The Nuxeo Platform provides a Search tab that enables you to browse and search the content of the Nuxeo Platform. This tab gives access to different searches to query the content of the application.
- Default search enables you to search on keywords, metadata and additional criteria such as the location in the application.
- Quick search is a full-text search. Quick search is available from the Search tab and from the top right corner of the screen. It provides suggestions of search results as you type your keywords. Note that this type of search can generate a lot of noise if you search for very generic keywords.
- NXQL search enables you to query the content of the platform using Nuxeo query language, giving you access to as many criteria as you need.
You can configure as many search forms as you need to provide users with search capabilities adapted to your business document types and rules.
Documents are indexed using their title, description, content (note field, attached files), and metadata. But these different search forms don't have the same behaviors and may not give you the same results. They can provide text fields in which you can type keywords, date fields in which you can select a date to define a period, lists from which you can select values. Text fields can be full-text search fields or exact match fields.
General Principles
Stemming
Full-text search uses stemming. Stemming is a process that reduces words to their uninflected root, which is not necessarily a word. This means that full-text search will return documents containing words that have the same stem as the word you entered into the search field. For instance, if you type "arguing" in a full-text search field, search results will return documents with"argue", "argued", "argues". In that case, the stem is "argu". But "argument" and "arguments" reduce to the stem "argument".
Operators and Wildcards
The application's search engine uses boolean operators and wildcards, to enable you to define your search on text fields. The Boolean operators and wildcards can be used on full-text search and exact match fields:
Full-text search fields:
- AND: all the words separated by the operator must be in the found documents. This is the default operator of all full-text search fields, so you actually just need your keywords and the AND operator is implied. Example: you are looking for documents about Nuxeo and marketing. Type Nuxeo marketing.
-: The keyword after this symbol must not be in the found documents. Example: you are looking for all the documents referring to the Nuxeo but not about meetings. Type Nuxeo -meeting.
You need to keep the - stuck to the word to be excluded. If you put a space between the - and the word after it, the - is ignored.
OR: any of the word before "OR" or the word after it must be in the found documents. Example: you are looking for documents that talk either about marketing or about sales. Type marketing OR sales.
The operator is capitalized in the example above to make it easier to see how the search is built, but it doesn't require to be capitalized. The same principle is applied in the rest of this page.
double quotes (""): the exact expression between quotes must be in the found documents. Example: you are looking for documents that have the sentence "copyright Nuxeo". Type "copyright Nuxeo".
The behavior of the search on a sentence between quotes depends on the database that you are using. But in general, stemming is still applied on a sentence search.
Exact match fields:
- %: this symbol replaces zero or more characters. It works like the more commonly used * (asterisk). Example: you are looking for documents having wiki- sites as a source (such as wikipedia, wikimapia, wiktionary, etc). Type wik% in the Source field of the advanced search form.
Ignored Words and Characters
To avoid noise in the search results, some words are ignored. Typically, words like "the" or "no" are not taken into account. This is configured at the database level. For PostgreSQL, you may want to take a look at the Text Search Functions and Operators page for more details on how search works on the database.
Some characters, that can often be used as wildward, are configured to be ignored if they are used in the search forms :
!#$%&'()*+,./\\\\:-@{|}`^~
You can configure escaped characters in the nuxeo.conf file using the org.nuxeo.query.builder.ignored.chars parameter.
Case-Sensitivity
Full-text search is case insensitive. You can search for "news", "News" or "NEWS", you will get the same results: all documents with the word news, whether it's capitalized or not.
On the other hand, exact match text fields are case-sensitive. You must type the word with exactly the same letter case as it is set on the documents to get a result: typing "copyright" in the Rights field of the advanced search form won't return documents with "Copyright" in their Rights field.